


Asynchronicity

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Dreams, Gen, Lots of mentioning of Rachel's eye and also lots of blood, Purple Prose, Suicide reference, really that's a mandatory tag for my fanfiction by now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 10:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2265480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last she knows is looking at the ceiling with one eye dark, her mind rattling like a piece of broken-down machinery through some plan or another, some hysterical idea of revenge, and then darkness. </p><p>Maybe she dreams. Maybe she doesn’t. If she does dream, you have a number of options for what she dreams <i>of</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Asynchronicity

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first unprompted fic in a _long_ time, and it is kind of a mess. Just to warn you.

In Norse mythology, Odin the god-king gouged out his own eye as the price for wisdom – it sank to the bottom of the well, trailing blood, but with his remaining eye oh he could see everything. Everything in all the world. Infinite wisdom, beyond the imagining of man; the sort of wisdom Aldous Leekie would salivate to think of, if he raised his eyes from the microscope for one second to consider godhood. One eye, for eternity? Small price to pay.

Rachel Duncan is not this lucky.

It doesn’t help that the eye is the latest in a grand parade of losses – meaning both the removal of something and the opposite of victory. To clarify. She loses her father, she loses her chance at motherhood, she loses _to_ Sarah Manning, she loses her eye. In the end she lies on the floor losing blood and feeling, giddily, as if it’s the only thing she has left to do.

Of course it isn’t; she will run out of things to lose when the DYAD feels that she has stopped being of use to them. She is taken a few rooms down in the medical wing and someone is sent down to the basement, the one lit with the fluorescent green of tanks. They return with an eye clutched tightly in their fists, like Perseus, and she is reborn.

Or at least, this is the theory. She wouldn’t know; the last she knows is looking at the ceiling with one eye dark, her mind rattling like a piece of broken-down machinery through some plan or another, some hysterical idea of revenge, and then darkness.

Presumably she dreams. If you asked her, later, she would give you a tight smirk that means less-than-nothing; it’s fascinating how the twitch of muscles can be manipulated to mean both _you have the intellect of a child to even consider the question_ and _you could spend your entire life scaling the corporate ladder and still never have the clearance level to find out the answer_. While she both _is_ and _is not_ dreaming, the muscles in her face are manipulated by shining steel and the eye that both _is_ and _is not_ hers is nestled into place.

You might not be able to tell the difference.

If you were very, very stupid.

Maybe she dreams. Maybe she doesn’t. If she does dream, you have a number of options for what she dreams _of_ :

1\. In something like an afterlife, she wakes to find herself small and fragile and eerily soft to the touch, like a human being. Think of it like this: all of Rachel Duncan’s humanity was in that eye, and the brain behind it. It has been…exorcised, perhaps, and now it is dead. Dead and dreaming, dreaming and dead; you might not be able to tell the difference.

Anyways.

She walks through a dreamscape that stubbornly refuses to align itself to the neat lines of skyscrapers, offices, the modern furniture she has been scrabbling for since she was a child and desperate for some sort of clarity, the way furniture divides a room into stark lines, something like a modern labyrinth.

(A question: does that make Rachel Duncan the monster? Or is she merely lost?)

Instead she wades through: leaves, seas, what appears to be the sludge of homemade brownie mix. _Memory_ , she thinks, with whatever naked thing is left when you remove disgust. When she realizes that she is wandering through her own memories, her brain obliges and solidifies the edges, shoves Rachel back from her own mind or shoves her own mind back from her until she is standing in front of a screen, small and shivering and naked.

It’s taller than she remembers. Or maybe she’s shorter.

(An answer: why can we not consider both?)

“Rachel,” says a voice from behind her, and she turns obligingly, feeling a vague sense of déjà vu.

Daddy, she says.

Father, she says.

What are you doing here, I:

killed you

saw you die

am alive. You are not.

missed you

evicted you from my head years ago

am dreaming

killed you

saw you die

, she says.

“You’re right,” says Ethan, which doesn’t explain very much at all. He both _is_ and _is not_ old. He both _is_ and _is not_ dead. Schrodinger’s father: Rachel has been keeping him in a box for many, many years, to prevent the scale from tipping one way or another. He escaped the box, and she tried a cell; that didn’t work either. Tricky sort of beast, her father.

There’s something sticky on her face. She touches her skin but before she can bring her hand away her father’s hands are around her wrist, warm and firm and solid. Rachel can feel her pulse hammering away, like a trapped thing.

“Wait,” he says, urgently, “not yet.” So she curls her fingers into a fist and studies the wrinkles on her father’s face. The air smells like tea and rust and petrichor. Her father both _is_ and _is not_ alive. When she closes one eye he is young. When she closes the other—

Not yet, her father says again. Or maybe “Not yet.”

Are you supposed to tell me something, she says, remembering how to be angry, remembering how not to be naked. Is that the point of this.

“Oh, Rachel,” Ethan Duncan sighs. “And here I thought there was hope for you.”

2\. Let’s not kid ourselves. There is no magical spark of humanity left in Rachel Duncan, curled around a nerve ending and waiting to be pierced by wood, set free to find some better host and leave Rachel Duncan to her own devices. Rachel Duncan is Rachel Duncan, in all of her contradictions. In all of her cruelties.

Even in her dreams, she is still herself. To assume that dreams have meaning is ridiculous. Sideshow tents and horoscopes, lifelines for desperate people to cling to for fear of drowning.

(A question: is Rachel Duncan desperate?)

And since the last thing Rachel Duncan knows before dreaming is revenge, and since she spends her sleep with metal prickling at her skin (the low susurrus of instrument names, the sighs behind surgical masks, the unhurried tide of her own breathing), she dreams of both.

That is: there is a neat stark room that is likely – if one believes in this sort of thing – tucked away in the back of Rachel Duncan’s head. It is metal and glass. There is a bed in the center of it, made with hospital corners. It doesn’t look very comfortable.

Sarah Manning is on the bed. Her hands and feet are cuffed neatly to each post. She both _is_ and _is not_ afraid. When Rachel closes one eye Sarah looks at her, calmly. When she opens that eye, closes the other, the world blurs and wobbles and she can hear someone screaming – sobbing – breathing – but it gives her a headache and she opens both eyes again.

You done with that, then, Sarah says calmly. She sounds bored.

“Stop,” Rachel says, voice sharp and overly loud. “You’re supposed to be afraid of me. I have a knife.”

She does. Have a knife. It is silver and curved and lacks a hilt; one edge of it cuts into Rachel’s hand, however loosely she holds it. There’s something sticky leaking out of her palms but she keeps her fingers curled in a fist and doesn’t look.

I am what you made me, Sarah says, and they are in the room that Rachel kept for Kira, pink as a womb, and Sarah has no restraints at all. She wanders over to look at the mirror.

Rachel is on the other side of the mirror. She is still holding the knife. It slips in her palm.

“I didn’t make you,” Rachel says, but she sounds desperate even to her own ears.

(An answer: yes. Yes and always yes.)

It’s a lie. Rachel knows it just as well as Sarah does; Sarah is shaped around her ragged edges by all the things Rachel has taken from her, all the places Rachel has tried to force her to go. Leave Sarah alone and she will leave you alone, but: nothing makes Rachel more desperate than losing. Nothing makes Rachel more afraid, and nothing fuels her desire to win more than losing.

You see how well this has worked for her.

Sarah doesn’t seem to care; she is pacing in circles around the room, like a trapped thing. With every step she takes a pool of black spreads from her feet, like ink, like decay.

“ _Stop_ ,” Rachel says, “you’re ruining it,” and Sarah says It was always like this. You were always like this.

Her face is Rachel’s own. It has always been Rachel’s face, but now it is in a way that is impossible to explain.

Rachel looks at the knife; she raises it, taps the other end of the blade once-twice against the glass.

Sarah turns to look at her. She is not even a little bit afraid.

Rachel aims for Sarah’s eye, and _shoves_.

3\. (An answer: not even a little bit.)

And since the last thing Rachel Duncan knows before dreaming is revenge, and since she spends her sleep with metal prickling at her skin (the low susurrus of instrument names, the sighs behind surgical masks, the unhurried tide of her own breathing), she dreams of both.

That is: there is a neat stark room that is likely – if one believes in this sort of thing – tucked away in the back of Rachel Duncan’s head. It is metal and glass. There is a bed in the center of it, made with hospital corners. It doesn’t look very comfortable.

Sarah Manning is on the bed. Her hands and feet are cuffed neatly to each post. She both _is_ and _is not_ afraid. When Rachel closes one eye Sarah shakes, makes a low keen in the back of her throat, tugs fruitlessly at her restraints. When she opens that eye, closes the other, the world blurs and wobbles and she can hear someone screaming – sobbing – breathing – but it gives her a headache and she opens both eyes again.

“Rachel, _please_ ,” Sarah says, her eyes intent on Rachel’s (, and Rachel realizes there is something sticky on her face. She wipes it off with the back of her hand, and doesn’t look), “let me _go_.”

“No,” says Rachel, dreamily. She is standing at the foot of the bed. The bed is her own. She wonders why she didn’t recognize it.

“Why are you doing this?” Sarah asks, fumbling her way towards some sort of lifeline, as if at the center of the labyrinth of Rachel Duncan there is someone who will put down the knife and loosen the restraints in a gesture something like mercy.

I don’t know, Rachel says.

Then she repeats it, for emphasis: “You know why.” She watches Sarah’s eyes (Rachel’s vision is dark) (at least partially) flicker to her wrists, which are bloody, then to Rachel’s shower, which is likewise; lastly Sarah’s eyes meet Rachel’s and move down, down, to where her hands holding the knife are already stained with blood. Like a preparation, of sorts.

Rachel toes off her shoes and slides in one sinuous motion onto the bed, settles her weight above Sarah’s hips. Their bones press against each other, like Sarah is trying like Rachel is trying to swallow Sarah Rachel whole. Whole. Rachel leans her weight on one of Sarah’s wrists, for balance; between her fingers she can feel Sarah’s pulse hammering away, like a trapped thing.

“Please,” Sarah says, and again, “Rachel, _please_.” Rachel feels a spark of satisfaction light up the powder keg she has for lungs. The best thing about mercy is to give it you have to have power over someone. To grant a pardon is to acknowledge that you could have _not_ granted it, that you see this other person as less enough and small enough that you feel _sorry_ for them.

But this isn’t the time for mercy. Mercy burned in a lab fire, mercy was covered by concealer, mercy was swallowed gladly from a teacup. Rachel looks at the knife; she raises it, taps the other end of the blade once-twice against the skin under Sarah’s eye.

Sarah just looks at her. She is terrified.

Rachel smiles softly, lovingly, and _shoves_.

2\. The glass fractures in a spiderweb of cracks that seems to originate from Sarah’s eye; then Sarah blinks, and the illusion shatters just like the glass doesn’t. All that is left is the cacophony of skittering lines on the surface of the mirror, like a fungus, like something that never should have seen the light of day.

Did you really think that was going to work, says Sarah. Mirrors don’t shatter that easily.

Rachel means to say something but instead makes a high angry sound and stabs the mirror again, in the same place, even if it is no longer Sarah’s eye she is aiming for. All she knows is that she wants _out_ , that she is sick of being in this mirror, that she is sick of the way Sarah is looking at her with something like pity.

Sarah paces closer to the mirror, watching without interest as the pink of the room further dissolves, and exhales on the glass, a long _haaaa_. She begins drawing stick figures in the condensation with the tip of her index finger.

“No,” says Rachel, between her teeth – her hands are starting to slip on the sharp piece of metal she’s holding, and the mirror on her side is covered in blood – “that was Helena’s handiwork. You are not your sister.”

I am what you made me, Sarah says again, and this time she sounds sad and this time she sounds angry. You wanted me to be an animal. Like that would make it easier for you.

She looks at Rachel through the glass; although it is fractured by now not a single crack mars Sarah’s eyes. The ground beneath Rachel’s feet, in the cell of sorts adjoining Kira’s room, is covered in glittering pieces of glass.

Here I am, Sarah says. Are you proud of what you’ve done. Are you proud of what you’ve made.

4\. She’s fucking Paul – again – or maybe this is the first time; her slip has ridden up above her hips, and her bones knock against Paul’s. It is nothing at all like a devouring. This frustrates: what this is about, after all, is consumption. What this is about is swallowing someone whole.

So she rolls her hips forward, lets out an animal grunt between her teeth; she tries to put her hands on Paul’s chest but they slip on all the blood. Of course there is blood everywhere. That’s how this goes, isn’t it?

(An answer: it both _is_ and _is not_.)

But she can’t get leverage on the sticky-slippery skin of Paul’s chest, can’t breathe through the stink. The air smells like her own perfume and rust and petrichor. Underneath her Paul is silent, and not the right way, not the way that Daniel was. He is all wrong, in every way, except for the perfect necklace of fingerprint bruises around his throat.

She should probably be surprised that her hands don’t slip, once she’s wrapped her fingers around that skin. But there is a certainty that comes with dreaming and so she just feels a sort of satisfaction, at how her fingers fit perfectly over the set of bruises. She can feel her own orgasm approaching; she groans before realizing that Paul is shaking underneath her, seismic motions.

For a minute she thinks he’s dying (again) (again?), but when she looks down Paul is laughing and laughing and laughing.

She pulls her hands off his neck. She slaps him. His head moves in a great _crack_ away from her and it should be satisfying and it is not satisfying, not even a little bit. This is the problem.

“What,” she snaps, “is so funny.”

He looks at her without moving his head; his gaze is dark and bruised, a strange match to the white flash of his teeth.

“It’s just,” he says, “you think the bruises are yours.”

1\. What do you mean, she says. She can’t figure out whether she’s angry or whether she’s desperate, for there to be some sort of hope.

Her father gestures her to the chair in the middle of the room, with the hand that isn’t holding her wrist. Rachel shakes her head (she feels that there should be a phantom weight of hair around her shoulders but doesn’t remember why, doesn’t remember why there _is not_ ) (unless there _is_ ); she knows she is supposed to be standing, knows this is how this goes, even if she doesn’t remember why.

Ethan sighs, and takes the chair for himself. He lets go of her wrist; when she notices the blood smeared all over her fingertips, the room is suddenly lit by the flickering light of the screen behind her.

She turns to look at it. Onscreen is Rachel, and also Sarah,

and Sarah is holding a gun, and Rachel is weaponless,

and Rachel is holding a knife, and Sarah is weaponless,

and Rachel is holding a knife, and Rachel is weaponless,

and behind Rachel her father sighs, and says, “I do forgive you for your hate, Rachel.”

I don’t need your forgiveness, Rachel says.

I want it, Rachel says.

But I don’t need it.

Or maybe she doesn’t say the latter bit at all. Maybe instead she just watches herself, onscreen. Notes that she looks desperate and angry and afraid. Is this how other people see her? Is this how _Sarah_ sees her? Because she isn’t desperate, and she isn’t afraid. Not even a little bit.

The Rachel onscreen turns away from Sarah – she is still holding a knife, and she stabs the knife into the screen, almost close enough to take Rachel’s eye with it. She takes one, two, steps back. She fumbles. The knife comes through the screen, impossibly, and _rips_ ; behind Rachel, her father sighs, a wet gurgling sound.

She turns around.

 _No_ , she said. You’re not allowed. You can’t, I won’t let you, not _again_ , you _can’t_.

“That’s what I meant, you see,” says Ethan, who both _is_ and _is not_ dying, who both _is_ and _is not_ dead. Behind Rachel the screen rips and rips and casts her father in her shadow, neatly over him like a burial shroud. “You keep believing that your wants should trump others’. You can’t just demand the universe give you what you like, Rachel.”

I can, she sobs. I can, I will, please don’t go—

Her father has no pithy final words, this time. He is dead; he was only ever dead. Rachel holds his cold body in the black room, black as ink, black as decay, and waits to wake up.

5\. She wakes up in a hospital bed, to the serene beeping of monitors.

Oh, no, this is still a dream. No one is pretending otherwise.

(It _is_ a dream. It _is not_ a nightmare.

Or perhaps it’s the other way around. This depends on who you ask, and what sort of person answers; if you are the sort of person Rachel Duncan is, you wouldn’t get nightmares. You wouldn’t cry in public. You would _never_ howl like an animal, and cry, and say stupid things like _you can’t leave me again_.

Or perhaps it’s the other way around.)

But she wakes up anyways, and blinks with her eyes, and looks around the room with them. The vision in her left eye is slightly off, or maybe it’s her right one. Maybe it’s both. Maybe Rachel Duncan’s vision has never been precisely right.

She forgets about that fairly quickly, though, when she sees herself at the foot of the bed.

She’s bald, the Rachel who is not Rachel. Surgical scars criss-cross her torso and back where she’s curled, naked, on the edge of the bed. Her feet don’t quite touch the floor and her arms are wrapped under her legs. She looks vaguely like a child.

 _Sarah_ , Rachel thinks first, stupidly, with a surge of something that could possibly be fear rushing from the pit of her stomach and through her ribcage. It is stupid because there is no way to tell; with all distinguishing features removed this woman could be Sarah, or Alison, or Jennifer, or 324B00, or maybe even Rachel herself.

Awfully self-centered of you, says the silence that emerges from the mouth of the woman who is not Rachel.

(Quite a mouthful, for a silence.)

When the silence is met with an identical one from Rachel’s mouth, the woman at the edge of the bed doesn’t laugh and doesn’t say So, how do you like the eye. I made it myself.

She turns to look at Rachel. There is indeed a neat hole where her eye was. Maybe there was never an eye there at all.

The eye both _is_ and _is not_ there, you understand. It is wet by tears as Rachel blinks. Thinks. Considers the various layers of insanity that comprise the thought of _talking to yourself_. They go like this:

1\. The idea of _talking_.  
2\. The idea of _talking to.  
_ 3\. The idea of _yourself_.

She’s past the point of caring, really, about sanity. And so she does not clear her throat and she says, cold, soft, “I can barely tell the difference.”

324B00 – because that’s who it is, of course – doesn’t laugh. The room echoes with the sound of Rachel’s voice.

(A little background on 324B00. Think of it like this: the clones are machines, not human beings. They are put together out of tiny pieces and told to walk, to sing.

Machines, well, they break down. You’d better have extra parts in storage.)

(She is taken a few rooms down in the medical wing and someone is sent down to the basement, the one lit with the fluorescent green of tanks. They return with an eye clutched tightly in their fists, like Perseus, and she is reborn.

Meanwhile, a Rachel Duncan who is not Rachel Duncan stares at a world tinged faintly green before closing one eye, slowly, to see the world as void.

She’ll get used to it. She’s lost bigger things.)

“Are you supposed to tell me something,” Rachel says, feeling entirely too naked under 324B00’s gaze and feeling angry at that nakedness. “Is that the point of this.”

Why does there always have to be a point, says the silence. Why are you so desperate for an answer.

Rachel opens her mouth but 324B00 is already not saying No, there’s a point.

And then the woman who is not Rachel is Sarah, who is also not Rachel, and her weight is on top of Rachel on the bed. She is holding a knife with no hilt – poorly designed – that is just one long sharp piece of metal. It’s already covered in blood, but Sarah’s not bleeding.

“You don’t own us,” Sarah says, “and you think you can just _take_ from us, do you? Flesh and blood and freedom. You took my bloody _daughter_ , Rachel, and she isn’t yours to take.”

She is, Rachel says.

She is not, Rachel says.

“She should have been,” Rachel hisses, and they’re in the wreckage of Aldous’ office: the wreckage of the planter, the chair lying discarded in the middle of the floor. This is a dream, then -- Rachel would never lose control like that, not where anyone could see it. This must be the inside of her own mind. That’s the only place she’d permit such a mess. 

She’s caught, for a second, by the image of the window: it’s shattered, and blood drips steadily from the center. That’s not right—

But she’s too busy being furious to pay much attention to it. She’s spent so long shoving it down and shoving it down and now she is  _angry_ , wearing it like a perfectly-fitted suit, keeping her from being naked and vulnerable and bleeding.

“Everything you have should have been mine,” Rachel growls, and with the strange blurriness of dreams she is on top of Sarah, and she is holding the knife, and she is bleeding. With one eye she can see Sarah. With the other eye she can see nothing. “You don’t deserve any of it, your eye, your stupid little life, your purpose, the people who love you, your certainty, your happiness, your _daughter_ , you don’t deserve _any_ of it.”

But Sarah underneath her is laughing, a spitfire sort of motion; blood from the knife Rachel’s holding drips onto her face, smearing underneath and around her left eye. Sarah doesn’t seem to notice, still laughing, hissing, “You’re not even talking to me.”

She _is_ and _is not_. Who she is talking to is not-Rachel, which has always best been summed up in Sarah Manning.

(Who she is talking to is: 324B00, Alison, Helena, Cosima, Tony, Jennifer, Sarah. Not-Rachel. Not Rachel. _Not Rachel._ )

*. An interlude to discuss the idea of dreaming. Popular theory dictates that your mind consumes the world around it, masticates, and sends it down to be digested. Think of it like this: you are a cow. (You are meat, cattle, property…but that’s beside the point.) What you chew is sent down to your stomach and then sent back up, pulped and more easily digested.

We call this “dreaming.”

The point is this: what you eat is changed, by being inside of you.

The point is this: everything you dream is you.

The point is this: everything Rachel Duncan dreams is Rachel Duncan. She is herself, and Ethan, and the video screen. She is 324B00. She is the mirror, she is the empty womb-pink room. She is the knife that cuts the person that holds it, even as the person tries desperately to cut someone else. She is the blood that comes from the knife.

She is Sarah Manning, too. She just doesn’t want to admit it.

2\. Rachel doesn’t answer with words; instead she pushes the knife again, one last time, and watches as the glass shatters, collapses in on itself. The mirror is a window, now, and it gapes open like a mouth, all bloody teeth.

On the other side of the bloody, shattered glass is Aldous’ office. Rachel steps into the mouth-thing and emerges, breathing heavily, on the other side.

Sarah is waiting for her, standing in the center of the room, swaying on her feet from side to side to side. Look, she says, you broke the window. Wasn’t even me this time.

Look, she says, you broke this place more.

Look at you, she says, breaking things.

Look at you, she says. Breaking.

Rachel can still taste the fear on the roof of her mouth, sticky and cloying, from her first encounter with Sarah here. Then her mouth tastes burnt, from her anger, from her meeting with her – with Professor Duncan. Then she is tired. Her hands are still bleeding.

Sarah seems to have picked up on the mood; she’s walking in aimless circles, her boots scuffing through the glass and dirt and papers (upon inspection, Rachel notes that they are all pages from _The Island of Doctor Moreau_ ) (her subconscious has a flare for the dramatic – or perhaps her dreaming mind has pieced together the answer to the question she asked Sarah, the question that lost her an eye in the first place).

“Have you ever heard the phrase _lex talionis_ ,” Rachel asks Sarah’s back, tired as anything. Tired of the metal in her hand. Tired of thinking about revenge.

I know just as much about it as you, Sarah says, turning to face Rachel. In one, two steps she is far too close and then she sits on the desk, hands splayed and empty on the surface of it. She eyes Rachel, considering. You can’t honestly be considering takin’ an eye. Not really.

“I only want what’s owed to me,” Rachel says, exhausted, Rachel says, furious. She can’t decide what she is, who she is, can’t decide whether or not to be angry. She’s not sure what she has left, if she isn’t angry. What reason does she have to wake up, if not for revenge?

(“Everything DYAD wanted” both _is_ and _is not_ everything Rachel wanted.)

(You might not be able to tell the difference.

If you were very, very stupid.)

Bullshit you do, Sarah says, her boot heels hitting the desk with a resounding _thump_. You owe me bone marrow, and my sisters’ freedom, and months of therapy, and—

“Paul,” Rachel says, bitten-off, because Sarah’s never mentioned Paul at all and she wants to know that what she did _mattered_.

Instead Sarah snorts, says Fuck Paul. Pauses. Oh wait, you did. How’d that work out for you.

How’d _any_ of this work out for you, she says, angry now. You can’t keep doing this over and over again, you know what the definition of insanity is, yeah? How sane are you, Rachel Duncan?

“It doesn’t matter,” Rachel barks – or tries to; the sound comes out drawn-out, whiny, the voice of a frightened child. “That doesn’t _matter_ , you’re distracting me, you _will_ come to my terms if I have to—”

If you have to what, Sarah says, pushing off the desk and standing up. They are in Rachel’s apartment; Daniel is covered in a sheet of plastic on the ground. There is blood on him, and in the shower. This seems right.

There is blood on Rachel’s hands. This seems right too.

There is a puddle of blood in the center of the room, and in the center of the puddle is a chair – also dripping with blood, a small continuous sound in the quiet. There is blood in Rachel’s bed; she can see it from the corner of her eye, a great long smear of it starting about head-height and trailing back towards where they came. Rachel can see a pair of her own shoes discarded, incongruously, next to the bed. She wonders if that means something. All of this, she is certain, means something.

From her bedroom, she can hear her home movies playing to an audience of (no) one. _You won!_ says her father’s voice, over the sound of her own giggling, over the rattle of game pieces. _You beat me!_

Rachel mouths the next words along: _You’re learning_ very _rapidly. Soon you’ll be able to trounce anyone you’d like._

_I only want to trounce you, Daddy. I love you._

_I love you too. I’m proud of you._

Sarah’s toed the plastic off Daniel’s face, while Rachel was drowning in her memories (or the memories thereof); Rachel’s mind is kind to him, and has idealized him. He looks exactly like himself. Sarah has no way of knowing that, but she looks at him with a cousin to kindness anyways before turning and walking towards Rachel.

She stands almost close enough to touch, and Rachel is – Rachel is – Rachel is _sick_ of being in this mirror, sick of the way Sarah is looking at her with something like pity.

What do you have left to lose, Sarah says, slow. When you lose to me.

I don’t know, Rachel says.

Then she repeats it, for emphasis: “I don’t _know_. I don’t have a choice.” She spins on her heel and walks away, to stop the _stupid_ home video that she can hear looping, _you won you won you won you won you won_.

There’s always a _choice_ , Sarah says behind her, dogging her footsteps. She is that sort of ghost.

A low gulping laugh escapes Rachel’s throat and she whirls around, looking at Sarah lit in the flickering glow of Rachel’s home video, larger than life in this _stupid_ black box of a room. The screen is big and Rachel is small and her father is dead and if she does not beat Sarah it is all for _nothing_.

 _Beating_ me won’t bring your father back, Sarah says, too soft, and Rachel’s hand curls around the knife. She forgot she was holding it.

“This isn’t _about_ my father,” she says, voice shaking. “This is about _you_ , Sarah Manning.”

“If I can beat you,” she says, growing more and more fervent, “if you are cowed, everything else will fall into line. Everything will be just like it was, and my mistakes will be forgotten. The experiment will resume. Everything will be _just_ like it was.”

You honestly believe that, Sarah says with something a little like disgust and something a little like despair. You poor sap.

(A statement (that is, neither a question nor an answer): She does not believe it. The presence of Sarah Manning in Rachel Duncan’s mind, refusing to believe it, should tell you all you need to know.

Remember: Rachel dreams of Rachel. Remember that Sarah is Rachel, but Rachel is Rachel too.)

(She does not believe it, not really, but: she has no other choice but to believe it. Remember: Rachel Duncan envies Helena her purpose. Remember: Rachel Duncan has (had) everything the DYAD wanted, but never said it was what _she_ wanted.

Remember: Rachel Duncan has no one left to lose. She has nothing and no one left to gain. Perhaps she doesn’t even have a reason to stay alive; if you are the sort of person Rachel Duncan is, you wouldn’t stay alive for the joy of it. You wouldn’t stay alive for a dream, or a list of favorite things, or because somebody loves you.

Remember: Rachel Duncan has no one left to love her.

Can you begrudge her, using hate to keep herself alive?

Can you forgive her?)

“Stop _pitying_ me,” Rachel says – howls – roars – like an animal, and Rachel turns around to put her back to Sarah, to look at the screen.

This isn’t about my father, she’d said, but: there he is, onscreen. There is Rachel, too. Isn’t that the point of this room, memories of the two of them? Doesn’t matter how old they are, or that the picture keeps flickering onscreen – that Rachel both _is_ and _is not_ young, _is_ and _is_ _not_ blinded.

Maybe it _is_ the point, maybe it _is not_. Maybe there is no point. Maybe instead she just watches herself, onscreen. Notes that she looks desperate and angry and afraid. Is this how other people see her? Is this how _Sarah_ sees her? Because she isn’t desperate, and she isn’t afraid. Not even a little bit.

She watches herself watch herself and then she is suddenly, violently sick of it, and then her knife is in the screen, right in her left eye, and down and down and down.

 _Look at you,_ Sarah had said, _breaking things, breaking_ , and Rachel’s thoughts are a wordless howl; she hates the animal Sarah reduces her to, hates easily and effortlessly, hates her animal teeth and animal tongue and the animal knife in her animal hands.

Hates herself, maybe.

Hates Sarah too.

For what that’s worth.

That’s not the point. The point, if you are the sort of person who looks for one, is the jagged silver edge that rips through the screen.

On the other side of it is the same room. It’s like looking in a mirror.

If there is one thing Rachel is sick of, it is mirrors.

6\. “Rachel,” says Marion, sharply, and Rachel snaps awake with a rattle of the teacup in her hand. The two of them are sitting on what appear to be coffins, neat and glossy black; Rachel thinks perhaps she approves of the choice of material, makes a mental note to send someone a congratulatory email later.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmurs, the words dripping false and sticky from her lips, “I’ve completely forgotten myself. What _were_ you saying?”

“We’re choosing flowers,” Marion says slowly, “for your fathers’ funerals.”

Or perhaps she says _your father’s._ Rachel can’t tell – she feels like she’s sitting in a television whose audio keeps going in and out. What happened to my father, she says.

“You killed him,” Marion says, widening her eyebrows – how gauche, her expression says, to forget yourself. “Do you not remember?”

The air smells like flowers and Rachel thinks _balm_ , thinks _thrift_ , thinks _orange mock_. She’s not sure why.

“I don’t recall,” she says, orange mock.

You’re lying, says Marion. Honestly, Rachel, I thought I’d taught you better than that; you really are a terrible liar. Yellow carnations.

“They’ll look lovely against the black,” Rachel says, But we have to have asphodel, it’s important.

“Of course,” Marion murmurs. Rachel takes a sip from her teacup. It tastes like suicide. “How have you been, Rachel?” Marion continues, sipping delicately from her own teacup like she can’t taste it, the tea-rust-petrichor stink of it. “It’s not easy, losing so much in such a short time.”

One of the coffins _thumps_ , a steady heartbeat of a sound, when Marion says _losing_. Rachel realizes, slowly, that she’s not sure what’s _in_ the coffin. Who. Who’s in the coffin. Is she in the coffin? Maybe she _is_. Maybe she _is not_.

I’m afraid, Rachel says, and regrets it instantly.

Marion pauses, and sets her cup down with a soft _clink_ on the coffin. You always were, she says. You never quite learned how to stop being afraid.

“Would it help to see what’s inside?” she asks lightly, in a tone that says very clearly that it is not, in fact, a question. She is off the coffin. She is lifting the lid. Rachel wonders where her teacup has gone; Rachel is thinking _no, I do not want to see what’s inside_ , Rachel is desperate to not receive this answer.

She looks anyways. Or, rather, she slides off of her own coffin, feeling the teacup shattering in her hands, slicing them open, soaking them in something sticky and stinking so strongly of mourning bride that Rachel cannot even breathe through it.

She walks to the coffin. She looks in its open mouth.

2\. She sees her father, on the other side. Somehow, impossibly, he is there and alive and his face breaks into an enormous and stupid grin when he sees her.

Daddy, she thinks.

“Father,” she says, except it comes out more like _Father?_ and that’s when she remembers Sarah at her back. She wants to break that question mark like a spine and shove it down her throat, but it’s too late, it’s been released.

“Oh,” her father says, blinking, “Hello, Rachel. I didn’t realize you were here.”

Realization hits her like a punch that he wasn’t smiling at her at all. Slowly Rachel takes one step to the side, two, and reveals Sarah behind her, Sarah who is striding forward with a grin on her face. She slams into Ethan and wraps her arms around him; his arms engulf her and all Rachel can do is watch the two of them, lay eyes on that closed circuit while her hands hang, motionless, at her side. The knife slides out of her hand and falls soundlessly to the floor. No one notices.

“I’m so glad you’re alright,” Sarah says, and Rachel can almost taste the place where tears could be, would be, should be – but this is the inside of Rachel’s head, isn’t it, and she doesn’t know how to make Sarah cry there. Doesn’t know how to make Sarah the sort of creature who cries.

“As am I, my dear,” Ethan says. There’s a wave of bile rising in Rachel’s throat and she starts walking over to them, thinking she’ll do – something, break them apart or explain, very clearly, that Ethan is supposed to love Rachel best and Sarah is not supposed to be here at all – but no matter how fast she walks they stay just as far away from her and no matter how fast she walks her feet make no sound. In fact, they seem like they’re getting farther and farther away; maybe she’s just getting smaller, maybe her hair is starting to brush her shoulders, maybe it _is_ , maybe it _isn’t_ , she doesn’t know anymore.

What about me, she says, her voice like the small body of a bird after it’s hit a window, the rapid cooling, the fluttering of a heartbeat. Exactly like that. What about me.

“He always loved me best,” Sarah says. “That’s why I could bring ‘im back. He was just waiting for someone like me.”

“I did _try_ , Rachel,” Ethan says, his face folding itself into a facsimile of concern, “to love you. But I couldn’t _really_. That’s why I killed myself.”

“Sarah is the perfect daughter, isn’t she?” he continues. “Kind, strong, supportive of her family…a wonderful mother as well, I think.”

Sarah looks at Rachel, raises her eyebrows. You’re none of those things.

Rachel gives up.

She falls to the ground, in a motion that takes both two seconds and two minutes, and looks at her hands; they are small, and unmarked by time or blood. It’s too much, it’s a tangle of contradictions: if she was Sarah, people would love her, if she was better than Sarah, she would be worthy of love, there is no one left to love her, she does not want love, she wants to tear Sarah to the ground, she wants to be part of Sarah’s family, she wants to know how Sarah makes people love her, she wants and wants and there is blood on the ground and there is blood on her face and she wants and her eye is gone and she _wants_ and Sarah will always beat her, always always beat her, all Rachel is doing is running behind Sarah, she is that sort of ghost: hungry, wanting, she wants wants wants wants _wants_ —

 

 

 

 

 

Did any of those dreams satisfy? Did none of them? It doesn’t matter, either way; your wants don’t trump others’, and you can’t just demand the universe give you what you like. Rachel Duncan will wake up from her surgery whether you approve of her dreaming mind or not.

She will wake up. She _does_ wake up. Her mouth tastes like a number of metaphors; mostly it tastes like ash, and dust. She almost feels like crying at how the world shines, at how it seems like nothing has changed. She blinks so easily. She looks around the drab and empty hospital room.

(A question: is it a surprise, that no one is waiting for her?)

Rachel can’t remember what she was dreaming about, precisely, only that she feels heavy and hollow and contemplating the idea of revenge makes her stomach roll. That’s ridiculous, though, and likely some sort of aftereffect; on wobbling legs, she forces herself out of the hospital bed and takes one step forward, two, then more, until she is in the bathroom. By that time, the urge to vomit has passed, so: she moves to look at herself in the mirror.

She runs eyes along her face over and over, cataloguing minute changes: she looks tired, she looks angry, she looks _atrocious_ without her lipstick, (she looks more like the others without her lipstick,) her hair is in complete disarray…she looks like a broken-down machine, in summary. She looks lost, in every possible meaning of the word.

Except for the eyes.

The eyes, she notices, look exactly the same.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I’d have a chance to be my own  
> Free from the tyranny of the tarnished throne  
> Now I see that  
> The kingdom belongs to me, oh no.
> 
> I had so many irons in the fire  
> So many brands and swords  
> To their backsides I had even more  
> So many plans on what they’re for
> 
> In my nightmare tonight, there’s volcanoes erupting  
> A red hot web veining the land, it’s disgusting  
> Cracked mountains of madness, your hand in my nightmare tonight
> 
> In my nightmare tonight I’ll see me all consumed,  
> and attempting to sing disharmonious tunes with you.  
> Asynchronicity,  
> I am in misery.  
> I am in misery!  
> What has been done to me?  
> In my nightmare tonight  
> \--"My Nightmare," PhemieC
> 
> This fic is...kind of confusing...so I've typed up some of my notes on Tumblr [here](http://sharkodactyl.tumblr.com/post/96824372624). I'm not sure if they clarify anything, but they were fun to write. If you are still confused, feel free to message me.
> 
> Please kudos + comment if you liked! Thanks for reading!


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